By Adolfo Quizon Paglinawan

 

Series 6: Forever peace or forever wars?

The way Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr. postures, it is as if he can still save his heavily-scaffolded rook with rubbish rhetoric.

By the widest stretch of my imagination, the Philippine president’s dismissal of calls for his ouster as “nonsense,” arguing that it makes no sense to remove him when his administration is the only one actively investigating and exposing anomalies in state-funded flood control projects.

Obviously, he is either clueless or in denial, that he has become the elephant in the room whose gross mismanagement of our economy is sending us to the brink of a failure of State.

Nobody wishes to replace any sweating soul in his Cabinet, when every meeting sends incumbents to climbing walls, extremely anxious, frustrated, or restless about what ridiculous thing he is going to say or do next. 

The economy is in tatters, the people extremely polarized as selective justice supplants law enforcement, and society is like a volcano on the eve of an eruption, while his government is in shambles whose first priority is to cover-up for the trillions in plundered public funds mired in the flood-control scandal and wasted in syndicated corruption, by forcibly convicting an impeached vice president on trumped-up charges albeit being the only one still capable of undoing the ruin he has brought to this country.

Worst of all, his rear exit, the United States, that has been stilting him up, together with Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias-look alike Gibo Teodoro and Dyon Brooks improv Jay Tarriela, as its Gringo scarecrows in the South China Seas for the past three years, seems to be locked into a ruin also of its own doing.

Donald Trump is too busy fighting for his own political life.

Don McLean, never was so accurate:

“They were singing bye, bye, (this) American pie

Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
Them good ole boys were drinking whiskey ‘n rye
And singin’ this’ll be the day that I die.”

American pie

For months, Trump has been projecting strength toward Iran. Maximum pressure, maximum rhetoric, maximum threat.

The beleaguered American president even boasted that the U.S. “knocked the hell out of Iran” and gave the Iranian people a “week off” to conduct the funeral of slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini.

The hearse carrying the coffins Ayatollah Ali Khameini and his slain family members travelled through two countries and 5 cities

and about 20million people participating, perhaps the biggest funeral in history.

Iran appeared to back down, small gestures of de-escalation, diplomatic signals that were interpreted in Washington as evidence that the pressure was working. Despite every warning, despite every briefing, despite every historical precedent screaming at him to stop, Donald Trump however walked into a trap, a trap that was not set by Democrats, not set by the media, not set by any domestic political opponent.

This trap was set by Tehran and he cannot get out of it.

This was the revelation of Jiang Xueqin,  a Chinese-born Canadian educator and commentator, who is better known for his YouTube channel Predictive History, where he styles himself as “Professor Jiang“,

“Because the details of this trap are so elegant, so precisely engineered, that you almost have to admire the strategic thinking behind it, even as you recognize how catastrophic the consequences will be.

“Trump’s every public statement has been designed to communicate one message – “do not test me”.

And for months, the hawks around Trump pointed to these signals and said – “see, strength works. Iran is afraid.”

Jiang dismantled all this saying “but the hawks never understood Iranian discipline and strategic culture.”

In Persian chess, and chess was born in Persia, the most powerful move is not the attack. The most powerful move is the sacrifice that creates an attack your opponent cannot see until it is too late”.

Iran was not afraid, it was positioning. Iran sacrificed visibility, the appearance of strength. Iran allowed the world to believe it was retreating. And while the world watched Iran appear to retreat, Iran was building the architecture of a trap so comprehensive that once triggered, there is no move on the board that leads to safety.

The professor said the trap has three components.

Component one, economic.

Iran systematically built alternative oil export routes through intermediaries that bypass American sanctions. While Washington celebrated declining official Iranian oil exports, actual Iranian oil revenues instead increased.

“Because the shadow economy Iran built is larger, more sophisticated, and more resilient than anything the sanctions regime was designed to handle.”

Component two, military. While appearing to reduce provocative military activity, Iran accelerated its underground ballistic missile production.

“The missiles being produced are no longer the Shahab variants that Western intelligence has tracked for decades. These are new systems, solid fuel, road mobile, with guidance packages that represent a generational leap in accuracy.”

Component three, diplomatic.

“Iran quietly strengthened its relationships with every country that has a grievance against American economic coercion. And there are many such countries, Russia, China, India, Turkey, South Africa, Brazil. The list is long and growing.”

While Trump was tweeting about maximum pressure, Iran was building maximum resilience.

Jiang continues: “Trump is trapped between his promises and reality. If he escalates militarily, he starts a war that will define his presidency as a catastrophe. If he backs down, he admits that maximum pressure failed. If he tries to negotiate, Iran will demand terms that Trump cannot accept without appearing weak. Every door leads to a room Trump does not want to be in.”

This trap is not politically convenient, not strategically challenging. It is fatal because the trap does not just constrain Trump’s options regarding Iran.

Can Trump beat a ghost?

US vulnerability

The trap exposes the fundamental vulnerability of American foreign policy under any president.

The vulnerability is this. American power in the Middle East has always rested on two pillars: Military superiority and economic leverage. The ability to project force anywhere in the region within hours. And the ability to weaponize the dollar to punish anyone who defies American interests.

Iran has found a way to neutralize both pillars simultaneously. Military superiority means nothing if the cost of using it exceeds the benefit. And Iran has ensured that the cost of military confrontation through its proxy network, through its missile arsenal, through its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, exceeds any conceivable benefit.

Economic leverage means nothing if the target has built an alternative economic architecture. And Iran, with Chinese and Russian assistance, has done exactly that. So, what is left? What tool does America have that Iran has not already accounted for? The answer, and this is the part that should keep every strategist in Washington awake at night, is nothing.

There is nothing in the American toolkit that Iran has not already neutralized or prepared a counter for. This does not mean America is weak in absolute terms. America remains the most powerful military and economic force on Earth. But power is relative. And relative to Iran’s specific capabilities in its specific geographic theater, America’s advantages have been systematically eroded. Trump did not create this situation.

This erosion has been happening across multiple administrations. But Trump accelerated it.

The professor concludes: Iran thinks in centuries. America thinks in election cycles.

And that asymmetry in time horizon is why Iran’s trap works. Because Iran was willing to spend 20 years building a position of strength while accepting short-term pain.

And America was not willing to sustain a coherent strategy for more than four years at a time. Each new administration changed course. Each change of course gave Iran new information about American strategic confusion. And each piece of information Iran incorporated into its planning.

The dealmaker has met the wall. And behind that wall, Iran waits, patient, prepared, and fully aware that time is on its side.

Fertilizer emergency

Lena Petrova in World Affairs in Context, observed that something unusual just happened in Washington and it did not make front page headlines the way you might expect. President Trump has declared a national emergency on June 29, not over oil, not over war, not even over semiconductors, but over fertilizer.

“Buried inside the decision is a warning signal about something far bigger, which is the fragility of America’s food system, rising global supply chain instability, and a quiet crisis that could hit grocery prices in the month ahead,” she said.

The immediate action is very specific – suspending certain anti-dumping and countervailing duties on phosphate fertilizer imports from Morocco for up to eight months or until the emergency is lifted, with the goal of keeping its fertilizers flowing into the United States before the next planting cycle begins.

Petrova warned that if that doesn’t happen, the next risk is not just higher prices, but reduced harvests, tighter food supply, and potentially another wave of food inflation.

The White House made its position very clear. The position is fertilizer is no longer just an agricultural input; it is now a matter of national security.

To understand why this matters, you have to understand what fertilizer actually does.

Modern agriculture depends on three core nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Phosphate fertilizer specifically provides phosphorus, which is essential for crop growth and yield. Without it, production falls sharply. Corn, wheat, soybeans, rice, cotton, fruits, vegetables, nearly everything in the American food system depends on stable phosphate availability.

Farmers typically buy more than half of their annual phosphate fertilizer between fall that is September 1 and November 30, and early spring that is March. And so that means that supply disruptions right now don’t just create price volatility, they threaten the next harvest cycle.

Moreover, the lady commentator explained that what triggered the emergency wasn’t one single shock, but a multiple convergence.

First, global fertilizer supply chains have been disrupted by ongoing geopolitical conflicts, particularly in regions that are tied to production and export routes by US and Israel’s war against Iran because it effectively halted shipments through the Strait of Hormuz.

Now the second reason for the national emergency situation is that several major producing countries have restricted exports or introduced trade barriers which tighten global availability.

Now the third reason is shipping disruptions across key maritime routes have made fertilizer more expensive. It also made fertilizer shipments slower and less reliable to move.

All together, these three pressures have already pushed prices higher while making supply less predictable. And in Washington’s assessment, the window to secure fertilizer before planting season was closing fast.

So fourth, we come to the Morocco factor. Beneath its soil sits one of the largest phosphate reserves in the entire world. This is why it is a dominant global exporter of phosphate fertilizer and crucially it remains one of the few stable suppliers still available to ship to the United States.

The US knows how to kowtow when it miserably needs something from your country.

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Geo-fertilizer woes

It is not, however, a long-term solution. It is a short-term pressure valve to address the rise in fertilizer prices and the impact that supply chain disruptions have on the food security in the United States.  On the homefront, this raises a bigger structural question – why can’t the United States simply produce more of it domestically?

The answer is capacity and time. The United States does produce phosphate fertilizer but not enough to fully meet its domestic demand when exports and industrial needs are taken into account. Scaling up production is not something that happens quickly.

Petrova admits, “We don’t have the infrastructure. We don’t have the investment. We don’t have the tax structure to reward producers here domestically. We are not ready to scale up our domestic production. New mining operations are needed. We are going to need processing plants and chemical facilities. Those take years of investment.

Imports are not optional in the short term. They are an imperative.

The immediate impact of the emergency declaration is expected to be felt first by American farmers. Lower import costs could reduce fertilizer prices by an estimated 22% which will ease one of the most significant input pressures in agriculture.

That matters because farming margins are already very tight and fertilizer is one of the largest recurring costs in crop production. But the ripple effects extend even further. If fertilizer becomes more stable and affordable it supports higher crop yields in the next growing season.

Higher yields reduce the risk of supply shortages and that feeds directly into one of the most politically sensitive issues in the US economy which is food inflation. Even if consumers don’t see immediate price drops at the supermarket, fertilizer costs eventually show up in food prices with a delay.

There’s also a geopolitical layer here that cannot be ignored. Therefore , the declaration is not just about agriculture. It is about resilience.

In recent years global supply chains have been repeatedly disrupted. Let’s mention energy markets, semiconductor shortages, rare earth dependencies and now fertilizers. The pattern is becoming very clear. Commodities that were once treated as purely commercial are now being reclassified as strategic assets and governments are responding accordingly. That is why this move is being framed not just as economic policy but as national security policy.

If fertilizer supply breaks down it doesn’t just mean higher prices. It means lower yields that lead to tighter food supply and tighter food supply can translate into inflation, instability, food shortages and of course political pressure.

Fertilizer becomes a foundational pillar of national security and stability arguably as well.

We are entering an era where supply chains are no longer assumed to be stable, where food security is no longer separate from geopolitics and where even something as unglamorous if you will as fertilizer can become a trigger point for a national emergency declaration.

Philippines left behind?

As Marcos wallows in scandalous flood control waters, Trump loses its chess match with Iran and panics on the fertilizer issue, think tank Oxford Economics exposed that Philippines has captured “virtually none” of the regional manufacturing diversification away from China despite the ongoing “China+1”strategy adopted by global companies.

China+1 is a supply chain strategy in which companies diversify manufacturing beyond China by expanding production in other countries.

The Philippines is missing out in this category becauseof several structural and systemic hurdles prevent the country from capitalizing on manufacturing relocation.

• High Operational Costs: The Philippines struggles with some of the highest electricity and logistics costs in the ASEAN region, making it difficult to attract heavy industry and mass consumer-goods assembly.
• Supply Chain Gaps: The local industrial ecosystem lacks the depth and scale required for complex manufacturing, meaning secondary suppliers are sparse compared to hubs in Vietnam or Thailand.
• Investment Skew: While the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) has championed specialized niches (such as camera manufacturing and power module packaging), overall foreign direct investment (FDI) pledges have historically favored leisure, entertainment, and renewable energy over heavy industrial manufacturing.

In a report, Oxford lead economist Alexandra Hermann Prasad said production relocation from China has so far benefited only a handful of Asian economies, with Vietnam emerging as the clearest China+1 winner registering broad-based export market share gains in footwear, miscellaneous goods, textiles, as well as electronics and machinery parts and India making gains in electronics and tech manufacturing.

Oxford Economics noted that global manufacturing foreign direct investment (FDI) has increasingly shifted away from China driven by companies seeking to diversify supply chains amid geopolitical tensions as well as tariff uncertainty. These shifts have occurred selectively in lower-value-added consumer goods and electronics assembly rather than across manufacturing more broadly.

Despite lacking broader industrial scale, however, the Philippines retains specific bright spots in another category.

China +1+1 is a strategy for an advanced, hyper-diversified approach, maintaining operations in China, adding a primary secondary hub, and establishing a third location to avoid over-reliance on a single alternative.

• Electronics and Semiconductors: This sector remains a global leader and accounts for over 39.00 billion (about 53.4%) of total Philippine exports.
• Specialized Geopolitical Hedges: Some international firms, like Integrated Micro-Electronics Inc (IMI) operate specialized plants in locations like Laguna province to balance cost-efficiency with trade benefits, serving as a rare example of Chinese partners maintaining US market access via Philippine bases.
• Emerging Opportunities: PEZA is actively marketing the Philippines as a “China+1+1” destination—a secondary fallback option for supply-chain spillover when other regional nations hit capacity.

Conclusion

To improve a long-term outlook at regional competitiveness, Oxford Economics recommend that the Philippines must upgrade its domestic industrial depth and ease domestic regulatory and logistical hurdles.

The ultimate goal is to diversify beyond basic semiconductor assembly into mid-complexity industries like machinery and broaden onto chemicals to keep more value-added output locally. These latter fields also tend to spouse a larger labor component that is blue-collar which would benefit more Filipinos.

This means the government must already abandon its anachronistic policy that tolerates festering high cost of electricity and rush transportation infrastructure development and transshipment access t other parts of the country, especially Mindanao that is closer to potential natural resources, such as nickel and copper ore.

The prospects however remain dim under a hollow presidency.

The white elephant in Malacañang must go!

   

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